A man is found murdered in his Reykjavík flat, and the police have no obvious leads. The man lived alone and had no family, and of his only two friends, one is serving time for an array of petty crimes and psychotic violence, and the other hasn’t been heard of for twenty-five years.

Erlendur and his colleague Sigurdur Óli head the investigation team. They find a computer filled with downloaded pornography, and in a desk, the photograph of a young girl’s grave and the cryptic note left behind by the killer. Delving into the dead man’s past, they discover that forty years ago he was accused, though not convicted, of rape. Now Erlendur has to follow his instincts when his colleagues are losing faith in the investigation. Foraging into the past, Erlendur discovers that the city of Reykjavík has one or two secrets of its own, secrets it would rather keep.

Jar City is the first in a new and exciting series of crime novels from the land of the saga, and was a runaway success in Iceland.

The Christmas rush is under way in a big Reykjavik hotel when the police are called to the scene of a murder. The hotel doorman (and long-time resident of its basement) has been stabbed to death. With the hotel fully booked, the manager is desperate to keep the murder under wraps and his reputation intact.

Detectives Erlendur and Sigurdur Oli discover that the dead man had had a childhood brush with fame and that two old 45s on which he had sung have become prized collectors’ items. Estranged from his family for decades, why had the man continued to pay secret visits to his boyhood home?

As Detective Elinborg investigates a separate case of child abuse, and Erlendur continues to struggle both with his troubled family relationships and the ghosts of his own youth, their parallel stories probe deeper into the riddle of this latest Reykjavik Murder Mystery.

One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage. At first sight it appears to be a straightforward case of suicide; the woman, María, had never recovered from the loss of her mother two years earlier and had a history of depression. But when Karen, the friend who found her body, approaches Erlendur and gives him the tape of a séance that María had attended, his curiosity is aroused.

Driven by a need to find answers, Erlendur embarks on an unofficial investigation to find out why the woman’s life ended in such an abrupt and tragic manner. At the same time, he is haunted by the unresolved cases of two young people who went missing thirty years before, and, inevitably, his discoveries raise ghosts from his own past.

On an icy January day, the Reykjavik police are called to a block of flats where a body has been found in the garden: a young, dark-skinned boy, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. The discovery of a stab wound in his stomach extinguishes any hope that this was a tragic accident. Erlendur and his team embark on their investigation with little to go on but the news that the boy’s Thai half-brother is missing. Is he implicated, or simply afraid for his own life? The investigation soon unearths tensions simmering beneath the surface of Iceland’s outwardly liberal, multicultural society. The boy’s murder forces Erlendur to confront a tragedy in his own past. Soon, facts are emerging from the snow-filled darkness that are more chilling even than the Arctic night.